The Verge

Interim Reddit CEO Ellen Pao’s gender-discrimination trial against venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers LLP, wrapping up in a San Francisco courtroom next week, could wind up being a landmark case for women in male-dominated Silicon Valley. Given the remarkable number of women in the courtroom’s press gallery, it could wind up being an important case for female journalists as well.

Ellen Pao, center, with her attorney, Therese Lawless is seeking $16 million in her suit against Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers, alleging she was sexually harassed by male officials. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)

Pao’s case has had the tech world on the edge of its seat, and women reporters are the ones who put her story in the headlines. After Pao quietly filed suit in San Francisco Superior Court in May of 2012, TechCrunch reporter Colleen Taylor discovered the complaint and broke the story. Read more

Microsoft founder Bill Gates will be the first guest editor of The Verge, according to a release from the technology site.

In February, Gates will work with Verge staffers to “develop weekly content features” that correspond to major issues outlined in the 2015 Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation annual letter, including health, education, food and banking. He will also narrate four episodes of “The Big Future,” The Verge’s animated explainer series, according to the release.

The Verge promises to run “serious independent journalism” related to the themes laid out in Gates’ annual letter, according to an announcement by Verge Editor-in-Chief Nilay Patel:

Gates is our guest editor, but we have promised his team that we’ll do serious independent journalism against these themes; we will present a complete picture of this future to you.

Good morning! Here are some career updates from the journalism community:

Sandra Martin will be interim chief financial officer at Tribune Publishing. Previously, she was senior vice president of corporate finance there. (Chicago Tribune)

Liz Carter is now president and CEO at The Scripps Howard Foundation. Previously, she was executive director of Cincinnati’s St. Vincent de Paul. (Scripps Howard)

David Pierce will be a senior writer at Wired. Previously, he was deputy editor at The Verge. Robert Capps will be head of editorial for Wired. Previously, he was deputy editor there. Mark McClusky will be head of operations at Wired. Previously, he was editor of Wired.com. Mark Robinson will be an executive editor at Wired. Previously, he was features editor there. Joe Brown will be an executive editor at Wired.

The Verge has hired Valleywag editor Nitasha Tiku to be its West Coast senior editor, Business Insider’s Alyson Shontell writes.

Tiku recently took over as sole editor of Gawker Media’s tech publication after Sam Biddle departed for Gawker.

Tiku will work alongside Casey Newton, who was recently appointed The Verge’s Silicon Valley editor.

Verge Editor-in-Chief Nilay Patel told Poynter he wanted its West Coast operation to be more than a “trade publication,” citing competitors like Re/code and TechCrunch. Instead, he said, he wanted to examine “the culture and the companies” of Silicon Valley. Read more

Casey Newton is The Verge’s new Silicon Valley editor, the technology publication announced Wednesday. He previously covered Silicon Valley as a senior reporter, with editors at Verge HQ in New York overseeing his work. “What I realized was that Casey had been actually in charge for some time,” Verge Editor-in-Chief Nilay Patel said in a phone call with Poynter.

Newton.

Newton will be charged with taking on “the culture and the companies of Silicon Valley,” Patel said. He doesn’t want The Verge, which he took over three months ago, to approach Valley coverage as a “trade publication” — he named Re/code and TechCrunch as examples of those. “It’s the difference between Variety and Vanity Fair,” he said.

“The decisions that are being made here in Silicon Valley are affecting billions,” Newton told Poynter. Read more

Good morning! Here are some career updates from the journalism community:

Elise Hu will be NPR’s Asia correspondent in Seoul. She covers tech and culture at NPR. (Poynter)

Mitra Kalita is now executive editor-at-large for Quartz. Previously, she was ideas editor there. Paul Smalera will be Quartz’ new ideas editor. He is editor of The New York Times opinion app. (Poynter)

Donald Baer is now chairman of PBS’ board of directors. He is CEO of Burson-Marsteller. (PBS)

Jessica Coen is now a contributing editor at Marie Claire. She is an editor-at-large with Jezebel. (Fishbowl NY)

Stephen Lacy is now chairman of the Association of Magazine Media. He is CEO of the Meredith Corporation. (Email)

Bloomberg Politics got some attention Monday after an enterprising reporter noticed that navigating to a broken page on the site reveals this animation of Joe Biden shooting lightning at a revolving “404″ symbol:

That got me thinking: how do other news organizations handle the dreaded error message? To find out, I went to a lot of sites and broke a lot of links. Here’s what I found:

Bloomberg Business

The recently launched Bloomberg Business website has a colorful error page, like several other sites throughout the company. This one features a polygonal businessman a laptop off a table in frustration, then collapsing into his constituent parts.

Billy Penn

If for some reason you stray across a broken page at local news startup Billy Penn, you’re greeted by an oil painting of William Penn, the site’s namesake, who delivers a gentle admonishment: “Time is what we want most, but what we use worst.”

The Chicago Tribune

Break a link at The Chicago Tribune and a dapper fellow named “Colonel Tribune” appears and introduces himself as the “Web ambassador for chicagotribune.com.” He suggests you search the site’s topics pages before bidding you a fond farewell. Read more

“I was expecting traffic to crater,” Patel said. But pageviews actually jumped 11 percent from the previous week. More telling: Facebook engagement was up 52 percent.

Given the BuzzFeed-like content that the site ran as it experimented with tools like timelines, photo sliders and quizzes, that’s not a huge surprise. While articles like “Name this Samsung rectangle” clearly resonated with readers by offering something new, some commenters were a little fed up with all the quizzes and lists.

Patel won’t stay long at Vox, Swisher writes: “Sources said he will later move on to work on the site related to Vox Media’s purchase last November of the Curbed Network of sites that focus on real estate and restaurants, with its founder Lockhart Steele.”

Last year I interviewed Patel, a copyright attorney, about what a writer with a legal background can bring to a publication. “There’s this whole army of unemployed law-school grads and none of them is competing with me,” Patel said. Read more